Monmouth School Case Study

Fujitsu delivers a future-proof, dynamic IT

solution for Monmouth School

The challenge
Monmouth School relies heavily on its IT network to support its academic curriculum. All pupils have full access to email and can have personalised access to the network remotely from home or through PCs in the boarding houses. As the school's IT demands increased, there was an urgent need for a more resilient, energy efficient network. Consequently, Monmouth School looked to consolidate the number of servers and migrate from a traditional Network Attached Server (NAS) model to a more flexible network that enabled the IT team to test software patches in isolation before rollout.

The solution
Monmouth School has over 250 PCs located across the senior, prep and pre-prep schools, plus approximately 30 “Jack PCs” – thin client computers for evening use within the schools' five boarding houses. All classrooms have at least one PC and there are eight dedicated ICT suites. The school had therefore accumulated a lot of data, stored on separate servers. Eddie Maher, who heads up the IT department at Monmouth School, recognised there was a need to reduce the number of servers to cut spend on energy.

The solution was to create a virtual server environment, which would centralise storage and provide a more resilient and flexible solution. Working with Project Network, a professional services IT company, Fujitsu created a virtualised environment, using VMWare software in conjunction with two PRIMERGY blade servers.